Posted by compiler-guy 4 days ago
> Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person most often called "the father of the Internet" for his part in designing the network's common computer language, said in an e-mail interview yesterday, "I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."
As another commenter has pointed out, Vint Cerf himself credits Gore as playing a significant role in enabling the Internet’s emergence. He didn’t claim to have “invented” it.
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
Emphasis on actual words, with an obligatory side dish of context.
The key is not taking a quip on a live light entertainment show out of context, and resisting the urge to cough up shallow takes decades later perpetuating a politically biased take.
There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>
In a 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, he said “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” What he meant was that he sponsored the legislation that enabled the Internet to be accessible to the public, and several key Internet figures including Vint Cerf acknowledge his crucial role in enabling the Internet to become a public utility, which was not a given prior to his efforts.
Sure, he was talking himself up in the lead-up to the election and his language could have been more precise, but it was on off-hand remark in an interview, not a prepared speech or published text, and he clearly never claimed he “invented the Internet”.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
It's been a bit of a thing of mine for much of my life to notice likely bullshit in commonly-held beliefs, and to dig a little to understand what really happened or what was really said or meant.
And yes, I have always done this regardless of the political side, including in cases where there was uproar about things Trump supposedly said, including about the pandemic. (For the record, I'm not a U.S. citizen/voter, and I've voted for both sides of politics in the country where I am a citizen/voter, and my bullshit detector has been applied to both/all sides, including whichever one I was voting for.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
That is not a claim that he “created the Internet”. He, of anybody, knows that sponsoring legislation to enable the creation of a thing is not synonymous with personally creating the thing.
If he got anything wrong it was to be clumsy with words in a live interview. Who among us has not occasionally been clumsy with words in live conversation? That doesn’t license people to keep insisting we said a thing we didn’t actually say.
Can we post jokes?? Everyone knows Al Gore didn't sit around in an SV garage inventing the internet.
We’d love to see good jokes on HN, but they’re a precious rarity. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.)
I guess this one stings because I hate that HN is a place where our idea of a joke is mocking the work of a politician who really is credited by the pioneering technologists of the field to to have played a crucial role in enabling our industry to develop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
The same goes for you. Calling out bullshit and disinformation benefits the whole community,unlike nonsensical remarks. So if you don't appreciate efforts to counter nonsense by bringing facts to the discussion, just sit this one out.
I wonder what he feeling about it
That was almost nine years ago, and I actually increased my development work, with the caveat that no one pays me to do it, anymore.
Probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, but I didn’t think so, at the time.
I wish him luck.
Had I coinvented TCP/IP, I’d gladly take a bullshit, cushy paying job in my latter half of my career as a ‘reward’
I personally witnessed Vint give valuable advice to managers like me, often in difficult cases. It sounds banal but often in a large corp you know what you need to do, but will have a lot of - justified or not - doubt about whether you can get through the bureaucratic molasses and the political interests of your higher ups. Vint's backing enabled a lot of people to do what's right.
One of my colleagues has printed and framed a reply from such a thread, where he offered an opinion in support of another manger. Vint replied "This is good advice. V.".
I hope he enjoys retirement, well deserved
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on
his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
[1] open access journals were a big step forward, but I was open access decades before
[2] i'll join a club which is neutral on the issue, but I can't accept the positive position, not because I feel it threatens me but because it pains me to see a brilliant data scientist being jerked around (bad enough that the HR lady leaves) and not being able to tell him "your skills are in demand and you can find another employer on the other side of the street" (this is NYC) And the argument that "startups" need it is bogus: Google can take a chance on a lottery, a key employee at a startup is key however.